New
Delhi: The Income Tax Department today cautioned taxpayers not to share their
PIN or password of mails, saying it never asks for such details.
In
a statement, the department said it is to ensure that taxpayers are aware the
department does not seek confidential or financial information of the taxpayer
over email.“The
Income Tax Department never asks for your PIN numbers, passwords or similar access
information for credit cards, banks or other financial accounts through
e-mail,” it said.
“The
Income Tax Department appeals to taxpayers not to respond to such emails and
NOT to share information relating to their credit card, bank and other financial
accounts,” it added.The
Income Tax Department has been at the forefront of using technology in
implementing its e-governance initiatives, it said, adding, most of its routine
communication to taxpayers is through email and SMS.
“Therefore,
the department is very sensitive and alert to attempts made by fraudsters to
spoof the Department’s identity to send phishing emails,” it said.The
statement further said all taxpayer reports of phishing emails are forwarded to
incident@cert-in.org.in which is a government of India agency mandated to fight
against such threats.
Further,
the department has implemented best practices such as SPF (Sender Policy
Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message
Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) for its email domains.Use
of these protocols enables the email receiver domains such as Gmail, Yahoo,
Hotmail etc to determine whether or not a received email is actually from the
defined sender such as the Department and block phishing emails from reaching
the taxpayer, it said.
Listing
out dos and don’ts, it has asked the taxpayers to check for the domain name
carefully as fake emails will have miss-pelt or incorrect sounding variants of
websites of the Income Tax department.
“Do
not open such emails in spam or junk folder and do not reply to such emails. Do
not open any attachments. Attachments may contain malicious code,” it said.
